A texel represents the smallest unit of a texture that can be read from or written to by the GPU. A texel is composed of 1 to 4 components. Specifically, a texel may be any one of the available texture formats represented in the SurfaceFormat enumeration.

A cube texture is a collection of six textures, one for each face of the cube. All faces must be present in the cube texture. Also, a cube map surface must be the same pixel size in all three dimensions (x, y, and z). Figure 1 shows a fully populated texture cube.